[Gina]

Just remember as with the oils ... balance is key...I do not exclude dairy from my diet, I just don't eat or drink a lot of it, though I often have about 6 ounces of 1% milk with breakfast or on cereal. Of course we need calcium..., but the catch is that it is already found in almost anything we eat...fruits and veggies in particular. The problem with the more western diet is that by processing foods and making certain poor food choices (such as white rice instead of brown; processed grains instead of whole, etc), we are in general, becoming more and more magnesium deficient and with the media hyping calcium more calcium --the imbalance in the calcium to magnesium ratio is only made all the more worse instead of better, leading to exactly the increase in heart-related illnesses that we are witnessing all the time: High blood pressure (the calc plaque builds up inside the arteries--making the passages more narrow causing the blood pressure to rise); heart attack (Rhonda's real life story should be a warning to us all) and stroke (one of my dearest elderly friends had one TIA (transient ischemic attack or mini -stroke)after another following being advised by her physician to take up to 2,000mg of Calcium per day years ago for supposed osteoporosis after falling one day and breaking her wrist in her 70's...this brought on early and severe non-Alzheimers' dementia...it was horribly sad as in her prime she had been a teacher and an author of children's books.)

If I were a leader of this country, one of the first issues I would address is cleanliness of water supply and for reasons similarly to why we added vitamin A & D to milk, I swear, I would put the magnesium and other trace minerals...back in the drinking water...after GETTING RID of all the exotic bacteria (non-coliform) first of course...smile...for those of you who follow my bacterial-root of her-2 theories...you will get this.

Most folks are not even aware that by law, all the U.S. and State governments are required to remove from the public water supply are the e. coli and other anaerobic (non-oxygen breathing) coliform bacteria...all exotic bacteria...be it Moraxella osloensis, Shigella, H. pylori, and even Legionella are allowed to happily multiply and cause their nasties without any government impediment whatsoever. Ironically, this problem is due to another severe imbalance in our culture, one in which most public water authorities are using only ozone to "sanitize" the water supply. Ozone which is heavy oxygen or 03 is killing off all the anaerobic coliform all right and that is a good thing, but by taking out all the natural anaerobic predators of these often aerobic or air -breathing exotic bacteria mentioned above, these air-breathers are being allowed to increase and multiply to the point of becoming severe, though stealth, human pathogens, which would have never happened, had their population size been contained by their natural anaerobic counterparts rather than expanded by the lack there of and actually fueled by the extra oxygen provided so generously by the ozone (O3).

When these often gram -negative, air-breathing exotic bacteria are allowed to overgrow in the water supply, life becomes especially dangerous to some folks who, for whatever reasons, too many antacids or prilesec, have shut off the acid in their stomachs (the immunity's first line of defense against them), so they have no first defense to kill these new breeds of super bac. Others--even with their stomach acid intact may still get sick for reasons of heredity, illness, or gamma globulin or rhogam or other immuno- damaging situations that cause some folks to already have a pre-existing mal-funtion in their immune systems for dealing with aerobic versus anaerobic bacteria. Even though they will run no fevers nor show any outward signs, at first, of bacterial related illness, inside, these aerobic exotic bacteria will set up house-keeping inside their very cells and eventually usurp the cell's own protein making factories to do their own dirty work. The body will know something is off and call for its immune fighting cells to put out the fire. These cells will come to the "rescue" carrying buckets of basically what is the equivalent of hydrogen peroxide (oxygen) which would kill any normal anaerobic bacteria inside a similar cell, but have, like the calcium, the complete OPPOSITE effect on air-breathing bacteria. These exotic bacteria can now use the natural hydrogen peroxide as oxygenated fuel and a complex proteomics cascade will follow and escalate on the cellular microscopic level until one day...these changes will start to surface on the macro level and eventually become palpable. Some folks will even begin to display the exact signs and symptoms of guess what?? her-2 mediated disease. But that is a soap box that I will not HOP on tonight...smile.

Back to the topic of this thread, although most of you know that, in general, I do not favor a strictly vegan or vegetarian diet either, one benefit of those types of diets (as well as the macro-biotic) is USUALLY that they do a better job of balancing the calcium to magnesium ratio because of their essential inclusion of more beans and whole grains to meet non-animal protein level requirements. Still as noted above, even though these folks may succomb less to heart-related illnesses, they are still not making it past the age of 100, so in the final analysis, I think the Greeks said it best: "IN ALL THINGS MODERATION"...and "LET THY FOOD BE THY MEDICINE" to which I might add, 'Let thy water be free of exotic bac, especially those nasty gram-negative air-breathing ones'...smile....

GREAT Posts RB...keep that data pumping,
Gina